The Revd Graham Tomlin is Dean of Saint Mellitus College in London and Principal of St Paul’s Theological College. His work is closely associated with the Alpha course, and he is currently developing a new resource on the Theology of Alpha, to be released next year.

God’s ways are hard to understand. He certainly seems pretty arbitrary at times. He gives us things then he takes them away. What he gives with his right hand he takes away with his left. It can seem random and certainly not the way we would have done it if we were God.

The basic reality we soon learn in the Christian life is that God does not let us always get our own way. In fact he seldom does. We experience all kinds of limitations on us – other people get in the way, treat us badly, make decisions which affect us adversely. We make mistakes, accidents happen, we get sick, lose friends, waste money. The world and life do not work out the way we would have planned.

But all this is in God’s wisdom, necessary for us. When we get all we want, when life goes smoothly, money is good, friends are all around, life is comfortable, easy and predictable, we have status, recognition and success, all these have a habit of crowding out the quiet persistent voice that tells us that we are not to live by bread alone. We are such creatures that it is usually only when these things are taken away from us that we are able to hear that voice again. It is important for us to recognise that we are not self-sufficient, that we have our limits. To want to have no limit, to want everything to work out the way we want, to fulfil our own desires all the time, in is fact to submit to the temptation of Adam, to want to be like God. We are not God in that sense, and we need to learn that lesson.

More than that though, to have everything the way we wanted it would be to confirm us in our own present moral condition. When we get what we want, we don’t tend to grow or change. If it is true that we have a long way to go, then we need to be changed into people who know the true value of things, who love God above everything else, which is the only way to true happiness.

We are as Diogenes Allen says, ‘spiritual animals’ – unique beings in the universe who have bodies yet who are also spiritual in nature. We live in the constant tension between needing and taking delight in the good things of this life, and yet needing more than these things.

Our lives go through seasons – times when we are given glory, pleasures, delights and fun. At other times those are taken from us and we feel only their absence. We are to receive both from the hands of God. Luther speaks of God’s hidden will, his ‘strange’ and his ‘proper’ work in us. Luther reminds us that he so often deals with us through the very things we would run from – suffering, loss, shame, failure. But he only does this to give us something better than the good things God gives us in this world – comfort, friendship, wealth, and the rest.

So when things do not go the way we plan, when we make choices we regret as soon as we have made them, when things or people are taken from us that we thought we could not do without, in a mysterious and trusting way we receive these experiences as coming from the hand of God, as his means of bringing about his will for us, which is that we are transformed into the image of Christ, loving God above all things, joining in the mutual love of the Father, the Son and the Spirit.

Because it is only in that way that God’s two hands come together. We might think that because we are to learn to love God above all else that ‘non-spiritual' things like good food, friendship and status are bad things and to be avoided. On the other hand we might love and be attached to those things so much that we think they will truly satisfy (although it takes a severe lack of imagination and lack of desire to think that). Ultimately, only those who have learnt to love God above all else can truly enjoy the good things of life rightly and properly. “Seek first the Kingdom of God and all these things will be added to you.” So don’t be surprised when things don’t work out the way you planned, or God takes away something you dearly wanted or thought you needed. He’s only doing it to make you into someone capable of true happiness.